The Last Tsar (71 page)

“No, Anna Demidova’s story did not end on the day of the execution, and here is why I draw this conclusion. My father loved to take photographs, and we had a box of negatives with views of parks in the country and on that background photographs of friends. There were many pictures of Aunt Elizaveta in the company of Demidova and other tsarist servants. Therefore I knew Anna Stefanovna’s face very well and can see her now right before my eyes. Average height, plump, with a rather common, round face, her hair sleeked back at the temples and a headdress on the top of her head….

“Even before Aunt Elizaveta’s return to Russia, I was taken to visit her sister. To amuse me, they got out an album for me with a beautiful onyx binding—Aunt Elizaveta’s album. In it were at least ten photographs of Demidova. I already recognized her. But who this was in the album—a tall, lean, pockmarked woman—they couldn’t tell me; Aunt Elizaveta could tell me. Christmas 1929, when Aunt Elizaveta was home, we went to visit our aunts. Once again I asked for the album and began leafing through it—but all the photos of Demidova, even in groups, had vanished or been smeared over. To my question about where the photograph of ‘papa’s fiancée’ was, my aunts began hushing me, and when I inquired about the tall, pockmarked woman, Elizaveta said that she was a very good person but she died. And I cried.

“My aunts died from hunger on the same day, March 12. They had been supposed to be evacuated, and their passports had been taken away at ZhAKT [Housing Office], but they didn’t go. And no one would give them bread ration cards without a passport. (Thus the tsaritsa’s parlormaid died of hunger.)

“Demidova’s story surfaced later. I was working in a plant (54 Lermontov, Leningrad). In 1968 a master compressor technician came to see us in shop number 17—Demidov. I saw him for the first time and was dumbstruck. Where had I seen that face? And suddenly I knew—Anna Demidova. I sort of joked, in conversation with him, that if he put on a bonnet he would look like a lady I knew. I asked if he wasn’t related to Anna Stepanovna Demidova. He replied, ‘Not Stepanovna, Stefanovna—she was my father’s older stepsister.’ He said she died in the Patriotic War [World War II]. As Demidov described her to me, she was average height, plump with slick-backed hair, she drank, smoked, and never went out of the house. She was either afraid of her nephew or didn’t like him. Whenever she met him in the hall, she ran away. In the night she raved and cried out. So that her brother locked her in her room. I
asked Demidov to write about his aunt and he said: ‘That’s just asking for trouble.’ The woman shot by the name of Demidova was by all descriptions
tall
. So who was that tall woman from the album who was shot instead of Demidova?”

I set the letter aside. “Instead of Demidova?” Or maybe not instead? Maybe my guest’s version about the two being saved is true, and her father and aunts created all this obfuscation about the photographs of “the wrong Demidova” to confuse the girl and hide from her a very dangerous secret: Demidova was saved?

Soon after this letter I received a long-distance telephone call.

First I heard a cough, and then a familiar voice began to speak. My God, I’ve already finished the book, I’ve already written that line, so like a citation from a novel: “I never saw my guest again,” and here again—again this mysterious man!

The voice spoke without any introduction:

“Yesterday the remains of nine people were brought to the morgue of one of the hospitals in Sverdlovsk, now renamed Ekaterinburg again, as you well know. I hope you understand who I’m talking about?”

“No,” I said, although I did.

“Yes, these are the remains that were in the grave Yurovsky described. They opened up the grave yesterday.” And he hung up.

Just a few days after that call, reports appeared in the papers: on July 12, outside the village of Koptyaki, the grave was dug up where the remains of the tsar’s family supposedly had been buried.

Now my guest is sitting in my house once again.

He has failed significantly in these months; he is obviously ill. The conversation is constantly interrupted by his coughing, but his permanent sarcastic grin is unchanged.

“There, you see. So much has happened in the short time since we last met: Leningrad is Saint Petersburg again, Sverdlovsk is Ekaterinburg, and the Communist Party has been banned. Look at the coincidence: you finished your book about the last tsar simultaneously with the demise of communism in Russia.

“So, the grave Yurovsky described was dug up. [I realized the introduction was over and the story had begun.] By the way, the first attempt to uncover it was back in 1979.”

“I know about that.”

He continues, though, as if he had not heard me.

“Three Sverdlovsk geologists and one Moscow writer located the grave Yurovsky described. Subsequently, as we know, they talked about all the difficulties of their searches, but that was more to make the story interesting. In fact, one of them had access to the secret archives, and they knew the location of the grave Yurovsky had recorded. In 1979 they decided to dig it up. Then they removed three skulls from the grave, made casts, and put them back. One of the skulls had a gold dental bridge. They conjectured it had belonged to Nicholas. They did not talk about all this, naturally. Only ten years later did they tell the whole story in the press for the first time.

“So now, that is, twelve years later, these Sverdlovsk geologists have opened the grave a second time. The fact of the matter is that a rumor got started in Ekaterinburg that Moscow had decided to open the grave and take away the remains. And just as Ekaterinburg had not given up the Romanovs to Moscow while they were alive, now they decided not to give them up after their deaths. Generally speaking, it was all identical: secret murders and secret digging. Soldiers put a barrier up around the work site and wouldn’t let anyone in. Just as in July 1918, it had been terribly hot … but on the day of the grave’s unearthing there was a downpour.”

“You were there?”

“I didn’t have to be. I did have to know, however. They opened it up like barbarians, without a priest. It was around midnight when they came across the planking Yurovsky wrote about. Then came bones and entire skeletons, a skull with bullet holes and traces of rifle butt blows … fragments from the containers for the sulfuric acid that was supposed to disfigure the bodies beyond the point of recognition, and pieces from the rope used to raise the bodies out of the first mine shaft.… Then they hastily brought out the remains in carbine cases. A hole was left at the grave site, which quickly filled with rain. A muddy pool. Then the soldiers threw dirt and turf over it. In the local hospital, in the morgue, in the so-called soil room, where disfigured corpses go, they placed the tsar’s family. Forensic medical experts cleaned the dirt off the bones and skulls, dried them, and assigned inventory numbers. The martyrs were transformed into an archeological find.”

“You mean you think this was really the tsar’s grave?”

“I think they discovered the grave Yurovsky wrote about. Were the remains of the tsar and his family in it? Or had the remains been burned and was this only a false grave?

“If, however, it is proved that this is the tsar’s family, then the
first expert opinions published recently become very interesting: of the eleven people shot, only nine skeletons were found in the grave.

i1.42
. Diagram of the grave near the village of Koptyaki presumed to contain the remains of the tsar’s murdered family. The plan shows the disposition of the corpses, fragments of the jars that contained the sulfuric acid, and segments of the rope that had been wound around the corpses. The diagram was drawn by participants in the 1991 grave opening.

“The remains of Alexei and one female skeleton are
missing.”

After this visit I started receiving astonishing “presents” from him. Although the entire Ekaterinburg investigation was cloaked in strictest secrecy, he sent me a detailed sketch of the corpses’ placement in the grave. Later, photographs of their skulls turned up on my desk. This skull with the bullet hole—is this the enchanting Olga? And this one with the gap where the nose had been—is this our hero, the last Russian tsar?

My guest phoned me one last time. “The excavations are still ongoing. They’re searching for the missing pair. The experts figure he couldn’t have burned the two bodies without leaving any trace at all. That would have taken too much wood, too much gasoline, and too much time, none of which Yurovsky had. Despite all that, they have yet to find them.” He laughed. “They’re still missing.”

“But what if they
are
found?”

“That would mean the rescued pair did not survive for long. We can only assume they died from their wounds after all and then were left by their rescuers in the surrounding woods, only to be discovered later by my friend Peter Ermakov, who had been so unnerved by their disappearance. Then he really may have burned them, or just buried them due to lack of time.”

I heard him laugh once again. “Although knowing what this glorious Chekist was like, we have to consider another possibility: When he didn’t find them he may have burned two similar bodies, just to be safe. In those years the Cheka had a wide assortment of bodies on hand. So those experts will have to do a painstaking job.”

Enough! Enough puzzles, enough of these endless mysteries and resurrections!

But again from nonbeing—the specter of the Ipatiev house, and the grand duchesses on their knees by the wall, and the hands holding revolvers poking through the doorway, and the sovereign’s forage cap rolling away toward the wall, and he himself keeling over backward. Lord have mercy!

Will I never finish this book?

F
inally! After all those years of vain attempts to storm the Central Party Archives without ever being allowed to work there! Still, with help from my readers, I did manage to find out what was in the documents I needed.

Take this intriguingly empty envelope, for instance….

In 1989, after my first article appeared in
Ogonyok
, I received an exceedingly curious letter from an unidentified reader:

“In the days when I was working in the Lenin archive of the Central Party Archives, I saw a strange
empty
envelope stamped ‘Directorate of Sovnarkom Affairs.’ On the envelope was a note: ‘Secret, to Comrade Lenin from Ekaterinburg, July 17, 12 noon.’

“It is not hard to gather from this note that the envelope once held a certain
secret
telegram sent from Ekaterinburg early on the morning of July 17, that is, immediately following the murder.

“Also on the envelope was the signature of Lenin himself: ‘Received. Lenin.’

“And there was a note saying a copy of this telegram had been sent to Sverdlov.

“But the telegram itself was not in the envelope: the envelope was empty.”

At the time I decided against publishing the letter without first verifying it. But I couldn’t. The Central Party Archives categorically refused to admit me.

Times have changed (for long?). I am sitting in the former Central Party Archives of the Communist Party.

Before me lies that same
empty
envelope from the secret telegram with Lenin’s signature of receipt.

And although the telegram has been removed as a precaution, I can guess the
subject
of this telegram from Ekaterinburg, which arrived the morning after the execution addressed to the individual who had given the order for that execution.

I can even imagine its content, because of that day, July 17, Ekaterinburg informed yet another initiator of the execution—Yakov Sverdlov—about the “extermination of the Romanovs.”

That telegram was preserved, though. It was found and deciphered, as we recall, by Investigator Sokolov. “Moscow, Kremlin…. Tell Sverdlov that the same fate has befallen the entire family as has its head. Officially the family will perish in the evacuation.”

There is something terrible in this remaining witness to the murder;
this empty envelope with its timorously removed telegram and very clear notes.

Yet another very important set of documents turned up in Russia, volumes that had been held for nearly half a century in the secret archives! Eight volumes of documents.

Four volumes had been kept in the Party Archives with a note on the cover: “Do not release to reading room.”

The other four volumes were in the archives of the Military Prosecutor of the former USSR.

The title printed on each volume:

“Preliminary investigation carried out by Special Judicial Investigator N. A. Sokolov.”

Yes, these were the actual volumes from the famous Sokolov investigation into the murder of the Romanovs!

All the testimony in the case had been signed personally by the witnesses Sokolov had questioned. It was on the basis of this file that he wrote his book,
The Murder of the Tsar’s Family
, in which he frequently cited documents from this file.

How did these volumes ever wind up in the archives of the Military Prosecutor and the Communist Party?

More than likely they came out of German archives the Soviet Army captured in Berlin. How did they come to be in Germany? By way of occupied France, of course, where Sokolov lived in emigration, conducting his endless inquiry right up until his death.